Institutional Anchors, Commitment Architecture, and Discursive Continuity: A Longitudinal Analysis of Turkish Airlines Sustainability Commitments, 2018-2024

This study examines how commitments in sustainability reports are shaped by institutional anchors, quantification, target difficulty, and longitudinal trajectories. Seven Turkish Airlines sustainability reports covering 2018-2024 were analyzed through structured document analysis and directed content analysis. The full dataset contains 153 forward-looking commitments; trajectory analysis covers 122 commitments whose outcomes could be observed in a subsequent report. Of the 58 commitments with an explicit external institutional anchor, 96.6% were qualitative, whereas 96.0% of the 50 quantitative commitments had no explicit external anchor. The overall reported attainment rate was 75.4%, but it ranged from 84.5% for qualitative commitments to 75.0% for absolute quantitative targets and 33.3% for relative quantitative targets. The raw attainment gap between coercively anchored and unanchored commitments fell from 25.3 to 19.2 percentage points when the comparison was restricted to qualitative commitments. Exploratory evidence indicates that cost-reducing commitments were more often quantified. Process traces also show that repetition alone does not establish stable measurement or institutional internalization. The findings suggest that institutional anchoring is most visibly associated with commitment architecture at the point of declaration, rather than with attainment alone. Conceptually, the study refines the decoupling argument by locating an earlier point of potential separation in commitment design and distinguishing an external institutional reference from a measurable threshold; the reported outcomes cannot establish a gap between actual practice and environmental impact.